[Filip Szymanski]

Nevermind, I just converted it to .mov and everything works fine now.

[Filip Szymanski]

Yeah I knew that DVD was MPEG-2.

The reason I was asking this question was because I wanted to use iDVD to create the DVD menus. However, Apple doesn’t have native support for MPEG-2 (which is dumb since it convert its to MPEG-2 in the end product) so I paid $20 for the MPEG-2 codec which allowed the video to work…but the sound was not existent. So I rendered it in QuickTime animation at 865×480 with a PAR of 1.0 and it worked out fine.

I really wish Apple would get better MPEG-2 support. It just seems backwards that they want you to use their program (quicktime) instead of MPEG-2 which it converts to anyways. Really frusterating stuff.

While I’m on the topic, is there a way to have professional menus like in iDVD with Encore or DVD Studio Pro? I’m assuming you can, I just need to learn some tutorials. iDVD is great because its easy and looks very professional. But at the same time its ease doesn’t give you many advanced options when customizing a DVD.

[Filip Szymanski]

Well my current specs of my MacBook Pro is 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. The video card is a GeForce 8600M GT 256 MB

I just looked it up, it seems fairly easy (and cheep) to upgrade the ram in my MacBook Pro to 4 gigs so I’m already going to do that.

The one thing about the external drive. I actually have 2 MyBooks. One of them is a 500 gig that has firewire, USB 2.0 and eSATA. I connect it via Firewire. The second one is the 1 TB drive and only has a USB 2.0 connection (I goofed when ordering it, I meant to get the one with firewire). Is a firewire connection going to make that much of a difference as opposed to USB?

I think I’ll go for some more ram and see how that goes.

All of my programs (Premiere CS4, etc) are installed on that 5400 RPM drive with my OS but all of my media that I’m editing are on the 7200 external drives. That should be okay, right?

[Filip Szymanski]

Wow, for real? That sucks considering I’m exporting these videos from Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 Via Adobe Media Encoder. So, what options do I have? AVI? Anyone have any luck with this stuff?

[Filip Szymanski]

I tried that and when I put the matte in it cuts off the top and bottom of the video so i resize the Matte to be outside of the video playing area to where the it’s just above and below the video play area. But when I exported it the picture images are still going over the letterbox.

I just read through my previous post and it sounds confusing so I’m going to explain again.

I had a video that was filmed in 16:9. I imported it into a 16:9 project timeline and have edited it down to the final version. There are still pictures included here and there that are much bigger than the workspace so there is a lot of keyframed scaling and positioning used through out the video.

The video site that we are throwing these videos on doesn’t do 16:9 and squashes the picture to where it looks awkward.

So when I was exporting the video to h.264 (BTW, should I just export this to flash directly instead of h.264?) I chose the 4:3 option and the video looks fine, nothing is cut off and there is a letter box on top and bottom, just the way I want it to be. However, when it gets to the picture images that are larger than the workspace, the image goes over the letterbox.

[Filip Szymanski]

Thanks, saving it with an RGB profile worked!